Bless Us As Well
by altschmerz
Summary: It's the first Hanukkah after Rosslyn, and Toby has a gift for Josh. "It's the tallit that I wore when you were shot. I wore it while I prayed that you would live. That you'd be okay. And I want you to have it." (found family, gen)


ohhhhh man here we go again, my second ever west wing fic, and it's ktavnukkah again. maybe i post west wing fic once a year during hanukkah and never any other time. this is for prompt 'faith'. title and quote at the beginning is from the mishebeirach, the jewish prayer for healing, brief warnings in end notes.

please, let me know what you think! and happy hanukkah, from my home to yours.

* * *

 _May the one who blessed our mothers_

 _May the one who blessed our fathers_

 _Hear our prayer and bless us as well_

On first glance, there's nothing special about the day on which it happens. Josh will be the first to admit that, amidst everything else he's got to keep track of in his life, Jewish holidays tend to sneak up on him. He would like to offer, in his defense, that Jewish holidays move, and are unlikely to be marked on the calendar somewhere near his desk, which is additionally usually one to three months off at any given moment. As such, he'd like to think he can be forgiven for not realizing it's already the third day of Hanukkah, the day Toby apropos of nothing walks into his office and says, "I have something for you. Do you have time to meet me later?"

Josh blinks at him.

"You have something for me," he repeats, completely blank.

"Yes," Toby confirms, sounding rushed. He's still standing just barely inside Josh's office, hand braced on the door jam like he's just popping in for a moment. "Now when can you meet me? It can be your place, mine, I don't care."

"I don't have time to meet you somewhere, Toby, I barely have ten seconds to inhale a meal every other day, or did you miss the part about where we work?" With a bewildered smile, Josh waves a confused hand around his office to indicate a general sense of 'I have no idea what you're talking about'. "What do you have for me?"

"It's a gift, and you can find time, I'm sure. It's Hanukkah."

Again, Josh blinks. A moment later, he regains his ability to speak, and what he says is, "Oh, shit, is it really? And this means you have a _gift_ for me? Why does it being Hanukkah mean you have a gift for me?"

" _Because_ in its proximity to Christmas and thus the association therewith, Hanukkah has both been blown into a much larger holiday than it actually is, in terms of Jewish tradition, and been somewhat commercialized in this capitalist Christo-centric society into a holiday on which one gives gifts to children and family members," Toby explains with a kind of pedantic thoroughness that indicates he's becoming extremely irritated with the conversation at hand. This confuses Josh as it was, to his best recollection, _Toby_ who started it in the first place. "Now can you _please_ tell me when you have a moment to meet me somewhere so I can give you something, and then we can both get on back with our day."

"Toby, I told you, I don't have _time_ , so-"

"Fine! You want to do this _here_ we can do this _here,_ " Toby snaps, and before Josh can process this or ask to be clued on on _what exactly 'this' is_ , he's gone, out of the office and down the hall, only the chatter of the people outside and the blurred shapes of assistants and runners moving past one another in the backdrop in his wake.

Josh is left alone for approximately two or three minutes, and then Toby is back, and he's got something with him. The item is shoved towards Josh, but actually placed into his confused but waiting grasp with an odd kind of care that immediately has him thinking whatever is going on, it's far, far more significant than he'd expected at first glance of that harried, utterly nonsensical conversation.

The object Toby hands him is a folded heap of fabric. It isn't wrapped or in any way decorated with the usual trappings of a gift. It's just a folded piece of fabric, passed into Josh's hands with an understated reverence that has his breath caught still in his lungs. The color must once have been white, Josh can imagine it shining bright and pristine, but it's dulled somewhat, years making themselves known in the wear and dimming of the threads. Blue weaves through slightly yellowed white, beautiful stitches tracing a woven border along the edge of the garment, Hebrew laid above it. A long tassel hangs down over the side, trailing towards the floor, a fringe made of braided white strings. Josh unfolds it slowly, running a thumb across an embroidered letter _tav_.

"Toby?" he says, eyes lifting from the fabric to his friend, who is standing rigidly and not really looking at him. The entirety of the question is contained in two syllables, and Toby let out a short huff of breath.

"It's a tallit," Toby tells him stiffly, and Josh nods.

"I know what it is," he says, voice soft and lacking any recrimination. He may not be an observant Jew, but he's seen a prayer shawl before. "Why did you… What?"

"It's the tallit that I wore," Toby elaborates, still looking at the desk and not at Josh, sounding quiet and annoyed in the way that Josh knows means he's worried what he's saying won't be well received, "when you were shot. I wore it while I prayed that you would live. That you'd be okay. And I want you to have it."

The tallit suddenly feels heavy in Josh's hands. He looks back down at it, at the item that suddenly carries so much more significance than it already did.

 _It's the tallit that I wore when you were shot. I wore it while I prayed that you would live._

Josh can see it in his mind's eye, clear as if he'd been there to witness it himself. He can see Toby's bowed head, hunched shoulders draped in old, off-white fabric. The tallit is big enough he'd have been able to pull it all the way around himself, hold the ends together bunched against his sternum with the fringes dripping down to pool on the carpet. Josh can almost hear it, the words of the MiShebeirach prayer in a cracked gravel voice, his own Hebrew name, _Yehoshua ben Noach._ Toby making a desperate petition to a higher power on Josh's behalf, trying to wrap his faith around Josh like the tallit he's wrapped around himself, both actions an attempt at protecting them from something nameless and unthinkable.

It's an image that won't clear from his brain once it's arrived, and it's rendered him speechless. His fingers bunch a little in the tallit, soft threads like a corporeal blessing in his hands, and he looks at Toby with wide eyes.

"Toby," he says, the name not a question this time but a nameless expression of something he can't get out any other way.

"I could have lost... two brothers that day." Toby's voice is pitched so far down it's hard to hear him. His eyes are resolutely fixed on Josh's desk and his fingers are tapping a rhythmless beat against his thigh. "And it came very close to that. And I didn't. And I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed, and then you lived. And I know you're not- That you don't- But I feel like you should have it. I want you to have it."

The way he says it makes it sound like the question of Josh's survival had stretched out much farther than it had. It sounds as if Toby had spent longer than a shuttle landing, longer than a hospital stay, wondering if he would between one word and the next find himself sitting in his synagogue, wearing the tallit now in Josh's hands, and saying a prayer of mourning rather than one of healing.

Josh is taken with the sudden compulsion to ask just how many times Toby said the MiShebeirach before he was sure they were out of the woods, and he chokes it down, because he doesn't think he could bear the likely answer. If he has to picture Toby day after day during his exhaustingly long banishment from work, Toby in the car on the way in, Toby walking down the hall on his way out, every day when he found twenty-five seconds, the same prayer muttered under his breath… If Josh asks, and then has to _imagine that_ as it happened, he will actually lose his composure and break down crying in his office.

To this day, he's sure that if he asked, Toby could tell him every possible post-op complication of surgery for a gunshot wound to the torso straight from memory. He's sure that if he asked ten years from now, Toby could still tell him, as sure as Toby could rattle off the prayer for lighting the candles on Shabbat.

It's this he's thinking of when Toby's voice, plain English and empty of prayer or medicine, bites into Josh's rumination.

"Listen, if you don't want it, then I can just-"

"No!" It comes out louder and harsher than Josh meant it to, his fingers reflexively tightening in the fabric of the shawl. He clears his throat, hoping to persuade his voice to come out steady and within normal octave range this time. "No, it's… Thank you, Toby." He should say something more. Acknowledge the reality that this gift is more than a tallit, more than an old Jewish ritual object. He should… "It's beautiful." Not quite what he'd been going for, but he isn't the speechwriter here.

Instead of trying further, Josh gives up and just looks at Toby in a way he knows Toby's going to hate. He knows his expression is wide open and displaying every bit of emotion amplifying the dull roar of his pulse in his ears, and for the life of him, he can't bring himself to muster a poker face, to mask what this means to him. To mask that he knows what this means to Toby.

"Josh…" Sure enough, Toby's broken eye contact, looking down and to the side and at nothing in particular except 'not Josh's face'. He waves a hand around at his side, indicating that he's searching for words as fruitlessly as Josh is. Looks like neither of them are speechwriters today. Toby doesn't seem to find what he's looking for, so instead, his waving hand stills, then extends towards Josh.

After a moment of hovering in the air, the hand beckons a little, and Josh frowns. He clears his throat and takes a steadying breath, before asking, "What?"

Toby responds with a light scoff, shaking his head and gesturing more forcefully, both hands out this time.

"Oh for the love of God, _Joshua_ , just come here."

He can hear it in the background of Toby's voice, the shadow of Hebrew clinging to his Anglicized name, _Yehoshua_ agonized and fiercely reverent behind the annoyed snap of _Joshua_. It's never been quite so clear to Josh as it is in this moment, just how much Toby loves him. In this moment of clarity, he also realizes what it is Toby's trying to do.

"Oh," he says, stepping quickly forward, Toby's arms closing around him in a hard embrace the instant he's within reach. " _Oh_."

The tallit is trapped between them, Josh's fist holding it pressed back against his own chest, feeling the stuttered push of Toby's breath against the other side. His chin digs into Toby's shoulder, his free hand at the older man's side. Toby is holding him with a ferocity that implies he maybe never quite lost sight of what he'd seen that day.

Josh doesn't really remember most of it, but Sam had told him later, in a hushed voice, that it was Toby who'd found him.

The hug is uncharacteristically longer than any other time Toby's touched him, the small handful of times Josh has seen Toby hug _anyone_ , and Josh closes his eyes, leaning harder against him in response. It's been a very long time since Josh felt like somebody's little brother, had a peer he butted heads and bickered with who'd then turn around and hug him with a hand clasped over the back of his neck like the person holding him would have stood in front of a bullet for him if offered the choice.

"Thank you," Josh says hoarsely, words almost lost in the worn wool of Toby's ever-present overcoat. "For the…" He steps back when Toby lets go of him, hefting the tallit between them, both of their eyes fixed on shining blue embroidery rather than looking at one another. "Thank you, Toby."

"You don't have to use it, just…" Toby's voice drops down, barely audible the way it gets sometimes, when Josh is sure the words coming out of his mouth are purely his, no spin, no polish, no workshopping. "I wanted you to have it."

"Thank you," repeats Josh, hand skimming heirloom fabric. By the time he looks back up, Toby's gone.

The tallit sits on Josh's dresser, folded with a careful reverence that belies the fact that it's the only visible piece of judaica in his room. And if weeks later, in the days after some tough conversations with Leo and his trauma specialist, Josh finds himself at home, alone in his room with phantom sirens wailing in his mind, and he pulls the tallit off his dresser and folds it around his shoulders, holds the ends bunched tight against his sternum, and feels just a _little bit_ safer, well. He's the only one who'll ever know.


End file.
